Mambo News

Mambo 4.6 Sneak Peeks: MOStlyCE

One of the most anticipated features of the new Version 4.6 of the Mambo Open Source CMS is the MOStlyCE WYSIWYG Content Editor. Users have consistently requested improvements in Mambo’s content editing tools and a variety of third party vendors have jumped in to provide solutions to the problem. With MOStlyCE, many of the issues which were raised by the users have been addressed, giving users the power they want without having to install additional components or Mambots.

MOStlyCE is largely based on the updated TinyMCE engine, which has been extended by bundling with it a number of plugins and some custom code to make it more stable and suitable to the Mambo environment.  Tiny MCE was deployed with the Mambo system for a quite a while and during that period served well the users, but many users had outgrown its capabilities and some were frustrated with its failure to handle certain tasks. A quick look at the Forums shows more than a few incidents of people being forced to hand code what they needed, despite the presence of TinyMCE, and some purists even advising to “shut it off!” Certainly not ideal…

The decision to incorporate a new WYSIWYG Editor was initiated by users comments and the final functionality list was largely framed by the most common requests received.  Among the changes and new features are:

• Support for dedicated CSS files (rather than the default template CSS)
• Support for HTML templates for your content
• Better support for non-English language text entry
• Support for inclusion of Flash files 
• Creation of pop-ups
• Better support for accessibility standards
• More formatting options
• Better support for tables
• Support for Emoticons
• Find and replace functionality

Additionally, MOStlyCE is extensible.  New plugins can be added to the system and new language files uploaded. At present the Team is working on two new plugins which were tested in the Beta of 4.6: the Image Manager and the File Manager. Both are planned for deployment in the near future as optional upgrades.  The Team is also re-purposing MOStlyCE for the Mambo 4.5.3 series of sites, for those who wish to upgrade their existing Mambo sites without moving to 4.6.

Default MOStlyCE Toolbar

The MOStlyCE interface, pictured above, shows a much wider range of tools for users. The interface can be simplified and tools can be deleted from the interface or re-arranged. To improve performance, MOStlyCE provides caching.

One of the key differences between MOStlyCE and it predecessor is the flexibility of the tool: MOStlyCE is highly configurable by administrators. You can specify what tools are displayed, which plugins are loaded, which script elements are supported and much, much more. It answers many of the requests posed to us and solves a number of content management challenges.

For those of you who still love the TinyMCE Editor and don't want to change - no worries - we're still deploying TinyMCE along with the Core, giving users the choice of two WYSIWYG Editors or the use of the plain text editor.

4.6 also includes other changes and improvements unrelated to the WYSIWYG Editors so be sure to check out our other announcements.

The Public Beta of Mambo 4.6 is out now, with the first Release Candidate (ver 4.6 RC1) due Monday, April 17.  You can download the Public Beta, or any of the official Mambo Open Source CMS Core files from the Mambo Code forge.